a 900+ Tonne Corvette and a 1100+ Tonne Cutter having a head on collision should be absolutely catastrophic for both parties involved, not lose 14% shield and bounce off eachother for another pass.
Well you do realize that you can do the math on this one, right?
Let's take a typical large ship like the Anaconda, with a mass of around 1000 tons with a full combat fit and a boost velocity of 320 m/s with a typical Grade 3 dirty drive mod. That works out to a kinetic energy of 51,200 MJ at maximum velocity.
A typical shield output for a large ship is around 1000 MJ depending on mods. That means the kinetic energy from the collision is around 50X greater than the shield should be able to absorb assuming all of that kinetic energy is absorbed directly by the shield.
There are a few caveats here. First, that boost velocity is peak velocity and is only attained for a few seconds at most. Typical velocities are usually considerably less then this and this means that the typical kinetic energy involved in most collisions (i.e. when not boosting directly at another ship at maximum velocity prior to impact) would be around half of these values. That is still around 25,000 MJ, which again should still break the shield.
The second issue is that two colliding ships will not be colliding exactly head-on and will not actually have all that energy absorbed by the shield itself. Usually the ships are not going from full boost velocity to zero velocity during the collision. This is especially true in space where they can simply be "pushed" or "deflected" by an impact rather than slowed or stopped. This means that usually the shield is only absorbing a fraction of the total kinetic energy during the collision. That would mean you are only really "absorbing" maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of the total kinetic energy with the shield, which is still 10,000 MJ.
Even with these issues factored in, i.e., a glancing collision between two large ships at less then their maximum boost speeds, the shields should still be dealing with around 10,000 MJ of kinetic energy which is around 10X the energy needed to break the shield. This means that collisions between large ships should still involve kinetic energy transfer on scales that would immediately drop the shield and cause some hull damage.
The answer to why this doesn't happen is simply that FD probably doesn't want players to turn the game into space bumper cars by making ramming damage accurately reflect the actual energy transfer involved. Otherwise the answer to a heavily-shielded Corvette or Cutter would simply be a Federal Assault ship filled with HRPs and the best drive mod the player can roll and then turning it into a Federal Battering Ram.
Interestingly enough, there WAS a hammerhead corvette in the Force Awakens that was designed in a way that made it ideal for ramming and pushing around much larger Star Destroyers. So it DOES have some merit, it just isn't the type of gameplay that FD wants to support.
